Gospel, page 72
“Why should you have to give those animals anything?” said the rabbi.
“That boy was badly hurt,” O’Hanrahan stated quietly, feeling a premonition of pains in his hands and feet, brought on by the stress.
“What?” snapped the rabbi. “You wanna go back and give him mouth-to-mouth?”
“I wasn’t pleading his case,” said a tense O’Hanrahan. “It’s just that they’ll run up to their village and we’re not gonna be very safe if the first village we pass through telephones ahead to the last, and some Palestinians are waiting for us—”
“I wasn’t planning on dawdling in the next town.”
Lucy looked down at her right hand shaking. She held it with her left and that steadied her but she noticed how cold and bloodless they both were. She slumped down in the car and looked at the floorboard. How regrettable this all was. All this naked, purposeless hate. And she was right in supposing that there were tens of thousands of such young men, raised in refugee camps and impoverished streets and slums the Israeli government had no intention of improving, and there would be more and more of them, until the army killed every one of them or the Arab world rose and eliminated every single Israeli or an impossible policy of Love Thy Neighbor was attempted.
Approaching fast: the village they had encountered on the way in. It was obvious from the state of the car that they had seen some trouble. And that seemed to incite the locals to cause more. Two teenage boys took some stones from a neatly piled supply by the road and hurled two at the car. One hit the taillight with the smash of glass and plastic.
“Ah well,” murmured the rabbi, strangely serene again. “This is why I don’t take my own car anywhere. Wait till the guys in Maintenance see what we’re bringing back.”
Another village was ahead and Lucy saw three little girls run up with their stones to throw. The rabbi smiled at them and waved them no-no-no with his finger and they obeyed. Lucy stared down at the floorboard wishing to be miraculously transported out of the West Bank—hell, out of Israel. I would get on a plane tomorrow, she thought for the first time. A rock from somewhere bounced on top of the car. She didn’t look up or startle or turn to see who threw it and where it came from. Please, Lord, let this be over with soon.
(Alas, Beit Shahur approaches.)
“The army’s sure to be up ahead,” said the rabbi, steering this time to the village they’d bypassed on the trip in.
Lucy looked ahead to the roadblock. Israeli soldiers, lean and fierce looking, were stopping all traffic.
“Are you going to tell the soldiers about the injured boy?” asked Lucy.
“I’m going to tell the soldiers about those hoodlums, yes,” he said.
Lucy realized these soldiers, now world famous for their rough treatment of suspected Palestinian troublemakers, would not deal lightly with these boys or their families. They would get files devoted to them, stern warnings, maybe a night or so in jail, their families identified and known.
“Maybe we shouldn’t say anything,” said Lucy unsurely.
Rabbi Hersch threw up his hands. “Look at the car! They’re gonna ask what happened.”
“I don’t know,” she stammered, “it’s just if we get them in trouble, it’ll be worse for the next group that comes through there to Mar Saba—”
“I hope the soldiers go and beat the shit out of those boys and that’ll be a lesson to them.”
Indeed, at the checkpoint, the rabbi described the hoodlums in clear detail. What they were wearing, their ages; he had coolly studied them to make this very report. But the soldier, a young, officious woman with no courtesy about her, was acting gruff.
She asked, “What were you doing there, Rebbe?”
“Going to the library at Mar Saba, with my associate here, Patrick O’Hanrahan, and his assistant, Lucy Dantan.”
She said with a clipped Hebrew accent, “But there are no women allowed in Mar Saba.”
“Yes,” said the rabbi with forced politeness, “we know, but we thought she’d like to see the place from the outside.”
The Israeli soldier stared at them impassively.
“Would you please get out of the car,” she requested. “We’re going to ask you a few questions.”
“Oh boy,” mumbled O’Hanrahan. “The third degree.”
“It might not be so bad,” said the rabbi, pulling the car to the appointed place. The rabbi would not criticize Israeli security because it was the world’s best. A pain in the ass, yes, but planes didn’t blow up and stores didn’t go boom like in Northern Ireland.
“Where are we?” asked Lucy, before getting out of the car.
“Beit Shahur,” said the rabbi.
(In the summer of 1989, the citizens of Beit Shahur, largely Arab Christians, decided to stage a passive resistance campaign. Why should they pay taxes to Israel where they were second-class citizens, their rights weren’t recognized, and whose moneys went to shooting Palestinians. It was peaceful, nonviolent, and their manifesto was reasonable. An international team of journalists and peace activists gathered. All were arrested. Palestinian homes were looted by Israeli soldiers, valuables smashed, beloved objects burned, TV’s kicked in—the idea was to do the equivalent amount of damage as in back taxes. When the multi-faith peace groups protested, they were arrested too. This was November 1989, a week after the Israeli Army had broken in and seized U.N. documents that gave them a further list of Palestinian troublemakers to crack down upon.)
O’Hanrahan’s knuckles throbbed with circulation pains. He fumbled in his sportscoat pocket for his Percodan. At the first opportunity he’d take one. With his hand in his coat pocket he felt around for his passport. “I got some good news,” muttered O’Hanrahan momentarily. “I got my wallet and my license and some ID, but my passport is in my other jacket at the hotel.”
And this lapse meant an hour.
Sixty minutes of checking, double-checking, intensive questions, all cordial enough, all rational and understandable, but draining and invasive. Lucy’s passport was in order and after a small interview she was released.
She left the small official building—once someone’s home, seized by the army for whatever crimes had been alleged here—and glimpsed O’Hanrahan through a window, looking ancient, answering a series of questions. His political beliefs. Who belonged to the scribbled phone number he had in his wallet? It was an antiquities dealer, an Arab man in East Jerusalem. This suspicious fact opened up possibilities of antiquity smuggling and collusion with East Jerusalem terrorism, so another thirty minutes unfolded itself.
Lucy wandered into the street, hot with the dust-filled light of the late afternoon. There was a Palestinian fruitstand across the road. Lucy imagined she shouldn’t be mistreated here, a hundred yards from the police checkpoint. She walked over and was informed a bunch of grapes was a shekel. Not bad.
“American you?” said the smiling, toothless Palestinian grandfather who was shopkeeper.
“Yes.”
“Ah! Welcome to Intifada, eh?” he laughed.
“Yes,” she smiled, amused at the blunt fatalism of his comment. She handed him the shekel.
“Many, many friends in America, no?”
She wasn’t sure what the question was. “Excuse me?”
“Palestinians have many, many friends now in America, yes?”
“More and more, yes.”
“You tell in America? You tell them about us, yes?”
Lucy took her grapes and the tattered paper bag, much reused, the shopkeeper had put them in. “Yes, I’ll tell them,” she said. “Many people want the Palestinians to have a homeland.”
The man didn’t seem to understand the word, but his wife from behind a veil translated for him and he beamed, exposing his wide, unhealthy mouth. He reached over the piles of fruit and found a lovely, juicy peach for Lucy and handed it to her.
“For me?”
“For you,” he bowed. “You the American girl.”
She made a nod of acceptance and turned back to the police station and the car. What to make of it all? This exhausting, ceaseless, relentless place. In one hour in Israel, one does more thinking about moral, religious, ethical, and political principles than one does in anywhere else in a decade. I would like to erase my mind of this vexing place, she thought, biting into her peach. Delicious. This blessed weather produced the most excellent fruit, true to its reputation.
It was soon five o’clock, time to get back on the road and hit the Jerusalem rush hour.
“I think I speak for all of us,” said O’Hanrahan, revived after a cup of coffee, courtesy of his interrogator, “when I say it is time for a drink.”
* * *
After relaxing with some wine in a New City bistro, they went to a deli restaurant run by Parisian Jews where the rabbi, as if determined to show a softer side, picked up the check and ordered one of everything generously, and promised O’Hanrahan the best chopped liver in the city.
“This is as long as I’ve ever gone,” said O’Hanrahan, returned to ebullience, “without an Israeli chopped-liver fix. I was on the verge of a crise de foie.”
Lucy groaned and the rabbi pretended to ignore him.
“Some coffee?” the waiter asked. “French roast.”
“A consommation devoutly to be wished.”
“I see you’re back to normal, Paddy,” said the rabbi.
Then they trudged to a dessert café in the New City along Ben Yehuda, a pedestrian zone perfect for people-watching. Lucy, more paranoid than she was yesterday, wondered aloud if there was a chance of someone hurling a bomb in such a populous, much-enjoyed place.
“Of course there is,” said the rabbi, pouring the three of them another glass of chilled South African white wine. “But we cannot live in fear. We must trust in God. We will not…” But the rabbi scrapped the inevitable manifesto to follow. Enough for today, already!
He changed the topic to more mystical, escapist topics: the gematriot of the Sephardim. The rabbi unfolded a napkin and wrote out the ten sefiroth and twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alephbeth, singing as he wrote them, as if they were the ABCs: “… qoph, resh, sin, taw … and I’ve run out of song,” he concluded at the 22nd and final letter. “Now each letter has a value. Aleph to yodh is 1 through 10, on to qoph is 10 through 100 by tens, and the last three are 200, 300, and 400.”
“No values for vowel sounds?” checked Lucy.
“What vowels? Who taught you Hebrew? Can you read it without points?”
“Not very well,” she confessed, needing the marks that gave away the vowel sounds between the consonants.
“Not very well, she says. You read it with points, it’s not reading,” the rabbi pronounced. “This is how they teach Hebrew at Chicago? Who was your teacher?”
Lucy pointed at O’Hanrahan.
“Paddy, you should retire all over again,” said the rabbi.
“I can’t help it,” said O’Hanrahan, “if she didn’t do her homework.”
“I showed up for more classes than you did,” said Lucy. Turning to the rabbi, she asked of gematriot, “Isn’t this Jewish word-magic stuff all just coincidence? I mean, if you play with all words long enough can’t you get them to signify something?”
“Yes,” said the rabbi slowly, “but too many of these kinds of parallels and coincidences show up in Torah. Here’s an example from Habakkuk, one of my specialties. “In Habakkuk 3:2 it says, ‘In wrath remember mercy,’ or rachem in Hebrew, which comes to a value of 248. There are 248 Mosaic laws. The Law given to us by God is His greatest mercy.”
“Do you think,” asked Lucy, “that the Babylonian masters who compiled the Bible invented this word-magic and planted it in their revised editions?”
“Could well be,” said Rabbi Hersch. “Can you imagine the effect that rediscovering this sort of thing had on a learned man in ancient times or the Middle Ages? It was all the confirmation one needed to see that Hebrew was the very language of God, in and of itself magical, spiritual. It was not a long step to imagine that the letters and words themselves had magical powers. God, it is said, created the world by pronouncing his name. The Jewish custom of wearing phylacteries—you know what a phylactery is?”
Lucy said yes, remembering one of her great embarrassing moments when referring to a phylactery in Old Testament History at St. Eulalia’s as a “prophylactic.” She afterward pretended to have done it on purpose to anger Sister Miriam.
“The thephallin, the mezuzah, a prayer cylinder that can be affixed to doors … this reinforces the belief in the power of the words of the Torah. The name of Yahweh, the four consonants, the holy tetragrammetron, the 42-letter name of God, the 72-letter name of God, whatever, were powerful spells to conjur with, hence, the necessity of the commandment not to take thy Lord’s holy name in vain. This commandment may have less to do with disrespect than it does with the unknown, unpredictable powers of those letters. Moses killed the Egyptian with the schem ha-mephorasch, the spoken name of God,” the rabbi noted. “And early mystical works kind to Jesus assumed he knew the schem to raise up Lazarus. But, little girl, don’t pronounce this word unless you are pure of soul, perfectly chaste of body.”
“Well, that leaves me out,” mumbled O’Hanrahan.
“What happens?” asked Lucy.
“You die, of course. I’m not sure a woman can employ the schem in any event…”
(What of Lilith, first wife of Adam, Mordechai? For centuries rabbis held that Adam’s first mate was not Eve but Lilith, a not-so-great creation who coupled with Adam frequently, giving birth to the demons that plague all women today. She was banished from Eden because she decided she wanted to be the boss and proved her defiance by speaking the schem. Then three angels ran her out of Eden and into Egypt where Lilith threatened to be nearby for every human birth to provide pain, make for stillborn infants, deformities, and deaths of the mother. That’s why an amulet with the three angels Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangeloph is still worn by Sephardic Jews in some lands. And there was another woman who used the schem, a Babylonian Jew named Ishtahar. The Angel Schamchasu had this plan to make her a prostitute—mortal man cannot comprehend the wickedness, the silliness, the bother of most of Our angels—and Ishtahar spoke the schem and was allowed to hide in a Lower Heaven.)
O’Hanrahan interrupted by signaling for the waiter and ordering another bottle of Johannesburg Riesling. “That,” he insisted, “was word-magic.”
The rabbi: “I was raised as a child by my uncle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a strong distaste for this word hocus-pocus, because it was one more thing the Hasid believed and we didn’t. My uncle said what you say, little girl, that you can prove anything with it if you try.”
O’Hanrahan interrupted. “The name ‘Jesus’ and the word ‘Messiah’ both come to 74, which proves very inconvenient for the gematria crowd.”
“‘Jesus’ is Greek,” reminded the rabbi. “It doesn’t work with his Aramaic name. Anyway, in Brooklyn I heard the story from a Hasid about Rabbi Nehemiah who lived in a muddy little town by the name of Lodzuk in Poland. A Cossack-style raid in the early 1800s left the town burned to the ground and the people without a kopek. They turned to Nehemiah, their tzaddik, their Hasidic guru, if you will, and begged to know why God had allowed this to happen. The rabbi responded that it was God’s purpose that they should be brought low so they might see the wonders of Torah. Ludzuk, L-D-Z-W-K came to 67, he explained, and when added to “Torah,” 611, one got 678, which corresponds to Aravot, the Seventh and highest Heaven. Since aravot is also ‘fields’ he suggested the town return to them and begin planting their crops anew.”
“Wow,” said Lucy.
“As a kid in Brooklyn, I also heard tell of a nearby tzaddik who moved his whole congregation from the Sudetenland in the 1920s because of a chance remark an elder made that Hitler coming to power represented the writing on the wall. In Daniel, you’ll recall the finger of God comes down and writes Mene Mene Tekel Upharsim, whose letters have a value of 1776, the year of the birth of America. On the basis of that, he told the village to pack up for America and good thing he did. Would that that gematria had been the rage in Middle Europe!”
“Claptrap is claptrap,” said the doubting O’Hanrahan, “be it Roman Catholic relic nonsense or Jewish word-game nonsense. You gonna show Lucy how to make a golem, Morey?”
Rabbi Hersch began an explanation of how to create life:
“Job 28:13, as discussed in Midrash Tehillim, suggests that Torah was not in the exactly correct order, a letter or two out of place, chapters rearranged. If someone could reassemble it in the order God created it, then they too could create worlds and bring the dead to life.”
Lucy was reminded of what little she knew about Jewish mysticism. “And this is what kabbalists through the Middle Ages were trying to do?”
“You could make a man,” explained the rabbi with a straight face, “if one recited the Hebrew and the other 21 Divine Alphabets—there were many formulas—but your man-made creature, though alive, could never talk or think or speak. That alone was for God to accomplish. However, if one stumbled upon Torah in the correct order, one could make a man who could talk and have the gift of language. Solomon ibn-Gabirol did in the 1100s and he created a woman who cleaned his house and cooked his meals.”
O’Hanrahan: “Cheaper than buying one of those blow-up dolls, wouldn’t you say?”
Rabbi Hersch: “Ignore this man.”
O’Hanrahan: “Maybe you can get Rabbi Hersch to make you a man, Luce.”
Lucy attempted to raise the tone. “And so, Rabbi, you’ve been looking in these medieval Kabbalah guidebooks for alphabets?”
“To go a long way around, yes, I’ve been looking in copies of the Alphabet of Ben Zira. Ben Zira was a man with a great reputation for making and unmaking golems. I’m trying to imagine what Rabbi Rosen looked at when he translated the Gospel of Matthias in 1949. Did you ever meet Rabbi Rosen, Paddy?”
“I glimpsed him at some dinner once. I knew who he was, and I certainly knew who his wife was.”
Both he and Rabbi Hersch chuckled about this.
